Friday, March 30, 2012

My daughter Amy runs the communications for Nathan Fletcher, a candidate for mayor of San Diego (formally, she's the Deputy Campaign Manager, Communications -- she played a similar role in Carly Fiorina's senate campaign). Today, Fletcher announced that he is leaving the GOP.

We need two rational, competitive political parties. If this, and similar action from other moderates can help to bring Republicans back to sanity, that would be good for all of us.

[Let me add something: One of the reasons I started blogging just over seven years ago -- just after Bush was reelected --

was that, in my view, the Democratic party's voice had been taken over by the far left and that was hurting the party with the more moderate voters it needed to win elections. Whenever I'd hear the people representing Democrats in the media talk about economic issues, I often wanted to cringe. They weren't helping. Worse, the people representing the party in the media were very poor at countering the market fundamentalism that the other side used so effectively. So I wanted to try to add one voice, however small -- and it was as small as they get at that point -- to the debate. Free markets are an easy story to tell. Whatever the issue, the answer is the same:

get government out of the way and all will be well with the world. Market failure -- the main reason I advocated government intervention (I even had a series of posts on "Market Failure in Everything") -- is a harder sell and I wanted to help. I figured if everyone waited for someone else to do these things they wouldn't get done so one day, on a bit of a whim, I started a blog.

It turns out that maybe I'm not as moderate as I thought, and some of the people I thought were nuts might have had a few things to say worth listening to. But that's another story. What I'm wondering is if the Republicans lose the presidential election, will the more reality based voices within the Republican party begin to exert themselves far more than they have to date? I certainly hope so.]

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No Room for Moderates

My daughter Amy runs the communications for Nathan Fletcher, a candidate for mayor of San Diego (formally, she's the Deputy Campaign Manager, Communications -- she played a similar role in Carly Fiorina's senate campaign). Today, Fletcher announced that he is leaving the GOP.

We need two rational, competitive political parties. If this, and similar action from other moderates can help to bring Republicans back to sanity, that would be good for all of us.

[Let me add something: One of the reasons I started blogging just over seven years ago -- just after Bush was reelected --

was that, in my view, the Democratic party's voice had been taken over by the far left and that was hurting the party with the more moderate voters it needed to win elections. Whenever I'd hear the people representing Democrats in the media talk about economic issues, I often wanted to cringe. They weren't helping. Worse, the people representing the party in the media were very poor at countering the market fundamentalism that the other side used so effectively. So I wanted to try to add one voice, however small -- and it was as small as they get at that point -- to the debate. Free markets are an easy story to tell. Whatever the issue, the answer is the same:

get government out of the way and all will be well with the world. Market failure -- the main reason I advocated government intervention (I even had a series of posts on "Market Failure in Everything") -- is a harder sell and I wanted to help. I figured if everyone waited for someone else to do these things they wouldn't get done so one day, on a bit of a whim, I started a blog.

It turns out that maybe I'm not as moderate as I thought, and some of the people I thought were nuts might have had a few things to say worth listening to. But that's another story. What I'm wondering is if the Republicans lose the presidential election, will the more reality based voices within the Republican party begin to exert themselves far more than they have to date? I certainly hope so.]